General Comments Following yesterday's steep losses in every contract except nearby soybeans, the markets generally traded close to the vest overnight and during the first half of this morning. It was also the day of the USDA supply and demand revisions that were released at 12 p.m. ET.Weather remains an important issue, at least in Argentina, and the forecast for that country looked somewhat drier today than it did yesterday. The problem is the forecasts for rain always have been in the extended period (11- to-15 days), but they never seem to happen. The forecasts for some rain across the parched U.S. Southern Plains also turned out to be mostly a non-event with the driest (western) areas getting nothing. Weather also was making news ac...
What You Need to Know Today: Cattle futures extended their sharp selloff Friday as weakening cash cattle prices, deteriorating feedlot profitability, and reduced packer demand continued to weigh on the market. The inability of futures to sustain a rally following last week's bullish Cattle on...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.